Environmental Waste by John Seiler, City Journal August 21, 2015
Tom Steyer’s $1 billion “green-jobs” initiative is a bust.
August 21, 2015
California’s initiative process has sometimes been a boon to taxpayers—think Proposition 13, which checked the uncontrolled growth of property taxes. On other occasions, however, it has yielded some mighty boondoggles. Chief among these are the “boutique initiatives” advanced by celebrities and Silicon Valley billionaires to make themselves feel good or to advance pet political causes—think Proposition 10, Hollywood director Rob Reiner’s early-childhood-development measure that created a host of busybody commissions funded by cigarette taxes.
Boutique initiatives usually come with boutique prices. Among the costliest is Proposition 39, a 2012 measure that hiked corporate taxes on out-of-state businesses to “create energy efficiency and clean energy jobs” and fund “green energy” projects. Prop. 39 was the brainchild of hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer, who happened to make a substantial chunk of his fortune from coal and other “dirty energy” investments. Steyer poured $29.6 million of his own money into the campaign. Opposition was negligible; even several large corporations that would face hefty tax increases, such as General Motors, backpedaled from their initial opposition. Sixty-one percent of California voters approved the measure.
Three years on, the results are in: Proposition 39 is a massive waste. An Associated Press investigation found that the state legislature spent half of Proposition 39’s tax revenues “to fund clean energy projects in schools, promising to generate more than 11,000 jobs each year. Instead, only 1,700 jobs have been created in three years.” Moreover, the initiative has fallen well short of the revenue the state Legislative Analyst’s Office projected it would generate. According to the AP, “Proponents told voters in 2012 that it would send up to $550 million annually to the Clean Jobs Energy Fund. But it brought in just $381 million in 2013, $279 million in 2014 and $313 million in 2015.”
Naturally, Steyer and his allies didn’t respond well to the AP’s revelations. ...
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